


Quantum Superposition

by WaxDragons



Category: Hellsing
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drabble, Quantum Mechanics, With Headcanons, Yikes, and Schrodinger is just a trapped catboy, anyway time is the box, because it's cool to imagine the catboy of hellsing, but also like, but only slightly - Freeform, imagine the trauma and memory issues it could cause, in multiple places at once
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 23:36:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28964751
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WaxDragons/pseuds/WaxDragons
Summary: Schrodinger doesn’t like to think.He doesn’t really understand why—or think about it much, for that matter—but he trusts it. He trusts it like the sky overhead and the earth beneath his feet and the Major’s greeting every morning. It doesn’t matter when or where; as he wanders over the vast expanse of 50 years, a perpetual child running back and forth between cusps in time he just cannot pass, these things are constant.***Quantum Superposition or: A Drabble on the Nature of Millennium's Catboy
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	Quantum Superposition

Schrodinger doesn’t like to think.

He doesn’t really understand why—or think about it much, for that matter—but he trusts it. He trusts it like the sky overhead and the earth beneath his feet and the Major’s greeting every morning. It doesn’t matter when or where; as he wanders over the vast expanse of 50 years, a perpetual child running back and forth between cusps in time he just cannot pass, these things are constant.

At and between those cusps he knows he exists as he _is_ and beyond them: nothing. All he remembers of his beginning is waking up alone and terrified under Doc’s bloody hands and shining glasses. He thinks he spent time with the Captain, shielded under the behemoth’s intimidating presence, but he can’t remember for how long. A month? A year? A day? Had it ever stopped?

Sometimes he asks about before he became. It isn’t logical that he just blinked into existence one day, and deep down he knows this; he just doesn’t like thinking (about it). Sometimes he writes down a list to try and see what he can gather—but those always manage to disappear and all he’s left with is the trusty uniform laid out at the foot of his bed every morning when he wakes up after a night of sleep.

Alias: Schrodinger

Name:

Age:

Place of Birth:

Date of Birth:

He knows nothing of himself and he likes it that way. When he thinks about it, he gets sad. And when he gets sad, he has to stop thinking. And then he is as he is once more, born anew in a never-ending cycle of existence. 

When he asks about his past nobody dares answer. (They used to; usually to tell him conflicting stories and work him into a tizzy, but once it was so bad that the usually docile Captain had all but torn Zorin limb from limb, even under threat of execution.) He doesn’t ask anymore.

(He doesn’t know this, but his life as he knows it began in the Atomic Age. Information from Doc’s tests had been passed over to the Americans in return for involvement in weapons development.)

He thinks that he’s died before and accepts it. He doesn’t know how, or when, or why. And he doesn’t think about it because it hurts. Once he made the mistake of wondering if he would ever be free of this cycle and almost saw past the cusp in the future—he hasn’t done it since, even if living the same 50 years over and over is _boring_.

If he doesn’t think, he can’t tire of it.

That’s right. He laughs and he smiles, reveling in each moment he has for lack of any other option. There is no fear, no regret, no empathy. He’s a human child whose body has been stuffed with the very nature of being, bursting at the seams. It doesn’t matter if he watches his comrades die mutilated: Tubalcain dies and the Valentine brothers die and Rip dies and Zorin dies and all of their 1,000 vampiric soldiers die. If anything, at least that’s entertainment that never grows stale.

Even though none of that matters, he’s glad that he never sees an end to the Major or the Captain.

Sometimes, if he finds his mind wandering a little further than usual and his existence starting to dilute, he can feel himself in more than one place. It’s different from sitting in somebody’s head and existing as a thought. It’s a pleasant dissociation, an extraction from his drab reality, and he sees magical things he’s could never have dreamed being possible.

Trees as tall as buildings, spreading out their branches into the morning fog.

Desert sand as wide and far as the eye can see under a painfully blue sky.

Deep blue ocean stretching into a vast expanse of nothing speckled with alien lifeforms.

He knows he has three babysitters assigned in different spots of their main base at each waking moment to make sure he doesn’t run off or get into trouble—but they also never let him out from under watch without the Major’s order. As of late, on whatever cursed pass through these 50 years it is, he’s taken to dissociating more often.

He wants to _see_ things. Different things. _Distracting_ things.

And the guards think nothing of it—to them, he’s only taking an afternoon snooze, chatting with their beloved Major, harassing Doc in the lab, or watching the Captain work out. The list goes on.

And sure, he’s doing those things, but he’s also _not_ doing those things. He’s anywhere doing anything but. And sure, the memories are almost impossible to retain but that just means every time he sees something spectacular; he can see it again for the first time. And sure, that makes for a painfully lonely life where he has no idea what exactly he means to any of his fellow soldiers and even his beloved Major, but that’s just the price he’s got to pay.

He knows he’s lived through a life without aging a day one too many times. Schrodinger _really_ doesn’t like to think about that, or about exactly how little he knows about each of these lives. Didn’t cats only have nine? Mercy, he wishes he could skip over that second cusp and just get into something different.

Maybe once the cycle stops he could just start thinking again. If the cycle stops, he won’t hurt anymore, and the memories will stop running away from him. He can do things with _purpose_. (Deep down, he wants to make memories with a father figure; maybe the Major, maybe the Captain. He doesn’t care.)

But the unfortunate thing about not thinking is that he will never even consider breaking the cycle for himself. Until he faces himself more than just knowing he is, he will be both alive and dead, trapped in a 50-year box. Such is the paradox of Schrodinger’s cat.

**Author's Note:**

> The idea hit me for something short and fun to type up on a lazy afternoon, so here it is. Like I wrote out in the tags, it's cool to think over the implications of being everywhere and nowhere. Implying that he can exist in any space he wants like a single particle in space when observed also kind of implies he may be able to be in multiple places at once as long as he isn't being watched/interpreted too closely. Because like, quantum superposition! Two states of being can be overlaid! And the closer you get to understanding where a particle is, the less you understand about the time the particle is in. So like, whether he realizes it or not, Schrodinger may even have some degree of control over which time he's in. Than all that translates to Alucard when he's eaten. RIP.
> 
> Anyway it's probably massively traumatic and he can't form memories correctly. Because if you are in a constant state of flux then what is there for the brain to record, let alone comprehend? Somebody save this poor catboy. He just needs a good parental figure (he won't get that from Millennium) and lots of therapy.


End file.
